Page 77 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 57

benefited from the competition between Ottoman governors, tribes and
British traders for the control of agricultural regions, particularly after
the application of the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman commercial convention. By
the 1860s, for instance, the al-Danyal family from Baghdad controlled the
production and marketing of grain and rice outside the town. 40 An addi-
tional factor which disadvantaged Gulf merchants with no tribal connec-
tions was their inability to control militias in order to defend their cargo
and shipments. Weapons and armed retainers were the preserve of tribes
which accrued part of their revenue through the imposition of protection
fees.
The mobility of merchant capital, however, worked to the advantage of
Gulf traders, regardless of their background and specialisation. With
tribal secession, the relocation of merchants across the region is a constant
theme in the history of Gulf coastal towns. Entrepreneurs moved their
business if they could not secure for themselves advantageous terms or
conduct their trade in a safe environment. During the Bahrain civil war of
1842–3, for instance, Manama’s merchants fled en masse to Kuwait and
Lingah, reducing the commercial fleet of the islands to a quarter of its
size. 41 The fear of merchant secession had crucial implications: it
restrained the authority of rulers and forced them to impose relaxed
customs duties in order to assuage the sensibility of merchants and
entrepreneurs who in turn acquired considerable political leverage. In
1831 the import tariff on goods entering the harbour of Kuwait was only
2 per cent of value, and by 1845 taxes were collected only on commodities
purchased by Bedouin visitors to the town. In Bahrain, a customs admin-
istration slowly emerged after 1869 under ‘Isa ibn ‘Ali Al Khalifah, while
Dubai had no custom facilities for much of the nineteenth century. 42
This ‘free’ port regime, as Hala Fattah has called it, 43 not only con-
stituted one of the pillars of the urban political economy but was also a
necessary condition for the development of trading emporia at the periph-
ery of centralised administrations, which tended to enforce protectionist
polices in order to raise state revenue. Between 1792 and 1818 al-‘Uqayr,
the main seaport under Sa‘udi control in Eastern Arabia, charged up to 20
per cent ad valorem on dates and agricultural produce imported from

40
Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 141–4.
41
Kemball, ‘Memoranda on the Resources, Localities, and Relations’ (1845), fiche 1090–1,
p. 106, V 23/217 IOR.
42
Brucks, ‘Memoir Descriptive of the Navigation of the Gulf’ (1829–35), fiche 1096–7,
p. 576, V 23/217 IOR; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, p. 1760; Kemball, ‘Memoranda on the
Resources, Localities, and Relations’ (1845), fiche 1090–1, p. 109, V 23/217 IOR. Heard-
Bey, Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, p. 191.
43
Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 25–8.